dabo man said:
My primary workstation runs XUbuntu Linux 22.04. It's what I'm using about 95% of the time. No AV software involved.
I have a Windows 11 Oracle VirtualBox VM that I use mainly for playing Microsoft Flight Simulator and printing. Windows handles fonts with printing much better than Linux. I probably don't need paid AV on this machine. Windows Defender would be fine.
My 15 year old is a heavy gamer, and his machine runs Windows 10. He is always modding games and needs good AV protection. Kaspersky is really for him. It is stellar software. I'll probably wind up buying Bitdefender rather than using VPN to update my databases, but I'm not happy about being out the money, and I'm still waiting to see the evidence against the company.
It's not that I'm naive enough to believe that a Russian company wouldn't be collecting data on behalf of Putin. It's more than I'm cynical enough that I believe nothing that comes from a spokesperson in DC without evidence, and I've not been presented with any.
I can tell you from first hand knowledge that Russian CDNs, which Kaspersky only goes through when connecting back to home, are tied into Russian Intelligence services. And if you don't understand how CDNs work in general, they are decrypting all of the traffic to analyze things for acceleration and security, so nothing would be hidden if the CDN isn't trustworthy.
Overall it's a poor man's attempt at what China has done, so if you're a company and have a global network you have to segment China and Russia from the rest of your network. Also, from what I understand (and this is second hand knowledge) Russia has reportedly adopted China security controls on data centers. Which, back to first hand knowledge, means any government official has full access to any server in any data center at any time. It's illegal to have on disk encryption in a data center, that they don't have access to. Now, I don't know if Russia's control is at the level of China's, but I'm going to guess it's not far away. So do I believe Kaspersky is spying on you, not at all. At the same time, Russia's intelligence agency has full access to all data from Kaspersky without having to even get someone from Kaspersky involved or let them know.
So with all of that said, unless you're a big fish, or you have something on that computer that would flag an intelligence search, then it doesn't matter one bit. But, if you don't believe that DC and companies in the US have real reasons to block access to Kaspersky from critical systems, then I would strongly say you are incorrect.
